


the devil you know

by beamkatanachronicles



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Afterlife, Gen, gus fring goes to HECK
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 09:49:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16447544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beamkatanachronicles/pseuds/beamkatanachronicles
Summary: He's built up from nothing before. He can do it again.





	the devil you know

**Author's Note:**

> I got nostalgic for Breaking Bad while catching up to BCS, so I dug up an old writing sample to share. This was for an RP set... in Hell. Sucks to be Gus! :')

Hell is hot. Hell is hot, humid, and overcrowded. Everyone expects that.

What no one expects is that, every once in a while, there's a small respite... but it's never enough. The way that Hell dangles relief in front of his sweating brow is something that Gus would never have predicted: rusty and rickety electrical fans that sputter and creak and do little more than push stale air about, air conditioners from thirty years ago that blow more hot air than anything. The unreliability of it all and the inconvenience, exceedingly more _irritating_ in the face of eternity, are already beginning to drive him completely up the wall, only three weeks into his afterlife.

At least there's some element of nostalgia to the whole matter. When he and Max were only just starting their business together, before Los Pollos Hermanos, before the cartel, before he'd even immigrated to America, they'd cooked all through the blazing Mexican summer: spice recipes and methamphetamine formulas alike. Funny to think he'd be going through those motions twenty-odd years later, an entire (quite literal) lifetime ago. Discouraging as it is, it's still reassuring, in its own way. He's built up from nothing before. He can do it again. Not to mention that the market for drugs-- relief, an _escape_ \-- is possibly greater in hell. 

Dutifully, he mops his glistening face with a handkerchief-- he lingers on his right side, a perpetually itching mess of fleshy pink scar tissue-- then pockets the damp scrap of cloth and rolls his sleeves up once more. Gus is no chemist. He, however, plan, and he can organize, and he can negotiate and scheme... and he can cook, in the strictly legal sense. As soon as he can start up the restaurant again, a business he can rely upon for income, for routine, everything will be fine.

The stove he's talked his neighbor into letting him borrow is _not_ fine. 

Two out of three burners are broken, and the other two wobble dangerously. The deep pan he's currently frying a chicken thigh in is dented, severely undercooking one half of the chicken and beginning to burn the other. This is his third attempt, and his third wasted piece.

Gus counts the seconds it takes him to inhale and exhale. His hand wavers in the air, a finger minutely twitching, before he snaps up his tongs and shifts the meat's position in its bath of bubbling oil. 

He's got an eternity to get this right-- and an eternity to live with it if he doesn't. He'll have to spare as much patience as he's got and more, thinly-worn nerves or no.


End file.
